Desperate Hacks Cannot Help Themselves As New Club Named In Celtic Boss Pursuit.

Ewan Paton. Remember him?

I wrote about him the other day in relation to his truly lamentable piece on the subject of the “pros and cons” of Ange moving to Spurs.

It’s one of the worst pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time, and I gave it the full flame-thrower treatment by subjecting it to a paragraph by paragraph dissection.

Barely a half dozen hours later, he was quoting from a French football blog which linked Ange Postecoglou to Marseille. It’s a complete non-story, of course, but that didn’t stop other outlets jumping on top of it and running with it.

And this tells you a few things, none of them about our manager but plenty about the increasingly desperate media environment in which our club has to operate.

The most important thing it tells you is that Celtic fans cannot trust a word some of these people say.

If there has been a notable change in tone on this site, in particular, as regards Ange it’s because the heavy drum-beat is now coming from south of the border and I didn’t take any of this seriously until that was the case.

But when the London Evening Standard, which is plugged in down there, ran this story the other day it was time to pay attention.

Paton and others have been writing their own crap variations on it for months, when Ange wasn’t even in the top 10 candidates for the job and his article on this was no less abysmal because it appeared on a day when the links to London began to firm up into something more substantial than just Daily Record paper talk.

There was no logic to his meandering prose.

It was falling over its own feet at every turn.

It was obviously a piece of sloppy, indolent, thoughtless writing, the kind that you can read on clickbait blogs everywhere. It was no great surprise to see that it was his name on the Marseille piece when it popped up.

I can tell you exactly what happened too.

All these people do is create a Google Alert which tells them whenever Ange’s name appears in any online publication, in any context, anywhere in Europe. These people don’t even have to go trawling for stories any longer. All they do is wait to hear the ping of their inbox, and they go and see what someone somewhere else is saying about Ange.

They don’t care if it’s from a national title somewhere or an obscure blog written by someone living in a basement.

All they do is scan it, do a quick re-write and bang it up online.

We call these people journalists only because here in Scotland the profession itself has expanded the meaning of the word to include people who can write in complete sentences, albeit not very well for some of them. AI can already do that job better than they can. Given enough time and brain hormone, you could probably train a rhesus monkey to do it just as well.

What’s worse, of course, is that this story, and the number of other outlets which have run with it, proves one thing above all; even if Spurs appoint Enrique or someone else, even if Ange tells them where to shove it, even if he signs a three year or five year or ten year deal on the doorstep of Celtic Park after tomorrow’s game … this isn’t going to end.

An entire industry of people too lazy to go out and find real work is invested in this stuff now, and even if some of them weren’t also enemies of Celtic it’s impossible to tell the difference at this moment in time.